Type of read: Weekend/Lunchtime Read.

What made me pick it up: '25 Days' was a suggested read in my Book Club for the month of December. It's set up with 25 chapters, so you can read one chapter a day until Christmas. I enjoyed that style of reading last year when I did the Dracula Daily reading challenge and thought this could be another fun one.

Overall rating: Is '25 Days' great? No. Is it horribly bad? Also no. (Just kind of a little bit bad, but it's short so it's nearly forgivable.) Here's the thing: I ended up reading as quickly as I could because I was annoyed by the one-chapter-a-day mentality. There's not enough substance in the chapters to make it worth it to string this one along until Christmas. I do think that Jacobsen planned too much to have people read a chapter a day because the flow felt a bit choppy. I wondered if that was the writing or if it was the translation. I did like that the story followed multiple perspectives (mom, dad, and two kids), and I thought - at least for the length of the book - they did a great job of giving enough background but not making it too complicated. But at the end of the read, it kind of felt like something that was created in a college creative writing course where you're given a different prompt or requirement each week and then expected to make everything come together to make one finalized story in the end.

Reader's Note: '25 Days' includes themes of death, murder, assault, kidnapping, stalking, torture, and general fear/anxiety.